GDC 2001: Unreal Technology Demo

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Steve and Tal have sandwiches, watch pretty game.

By IGN Staff

GDC is better than work. After rolling into the show about 11:30, we did what all good editors do -- went in search of a free meal. Luckily the Epic folks happened to have a pretty decent spread set up as we were walking in, so we thought, "What the heck, let's see what's going on there."

Fortunately we were rewarded with an in-depth demo of the next step in Unreal technology, an engine that will be used in an upcoming game from Epic tentatively titled Unreal Warfare. In a word, impressive. The demo started off with an in-game, real time cutscene. The camera moves in on a massive, futuristic looking base. In a room at the top of the base, three guys stand around a spinning green globe. Suddenly the camera shifts to a hangar where heavily armed soldiers are running to their ship. Once they're aboard, the ship (which looks kind of like the one from Aliens) lifts off. The ship flies through an incredibly detailed and massive canyon while alien creatures roam about on the canyon floor. End intro.

Level designer Allen Willard then walked us through many of the improvements and enhancements that have been made to the engine over the past six months. The new specular highlighting system allows the developers to render much more believable lighting effects. The shine on environment and character models was apparent, but not overly so. You know, it's there but it's not distracting. A particle system renders the engine exhaust, water spray and flame effects. But the real improvements are the sophisticated hardware brushes. These brushes allow the level designers to layer up to 32 textures on top of one another (although they aren't currently using any more than 8 or 9 at a time). And to save processors power, any layers that are completely obscured by other layers won't be rendered at all.

The levels are much more detailed. Each scene is comprised of anywhere from 20 to 50,000 polygons. Following Allen around the first environment, we were treated to some spectacular views. The first level was a typical outdoor setting -- green hills, trees and the obligatory gigantic temple-like fortress (or fortress-like temple, I forget which it is). The really impressive level was a tree filled swamp. There are some portions of the level that require the machine to render over 250,000 polygons at once. Lucky for the developers that Epic can afford to buy a couple of GeForce 2 cards for the demo. And the increase in polygons on the levels is more than just an increase in detail; it's also an increase in size.

The tools for editing the levels are remarkably intuitive and allow the designers to work with the levels in real time. In other words, objects can be moved and effects can be added while the engine is running. The height of land can be adjusted within the level builder. This allows levels to be created much more quickly and much more accurately.

The character models are equally impressive. Featuring an 89 bone skeletal animation system, the models move very realistically. Animation blending ensures that the character can combine movements convincingly. Characters, which run anywhere from 3000 to 4000 polygons, also feature much improved facial animations. Scripted AI events are now much easier to include so we can not only expect the characters to look more believable, but behave more believable as well.

Allen and the rest of the crew weren't willing to discuss much in the way of gameplay, but they did let on that the game will probably feature multiplayer support for 32 to 64 players. The team still haven't told us the extent to which vehicles will be featured in the game but they have told us that full freeform flight for all players is definitely out. Too machine intensive, apparently. Look for more information soon.

On a more important note, various types of sandwiches were served. Steve had ham, Tal had turkey. They both split an order of chips and enjoyed a scrummy brownie. Anthony Chau wanted us to mention that he had diarrhea but we think that's in poor taste.